There's such an explosion of talent right now which can be traced to a small army of kids reading manga about 5-8 years ago. Has anyone considered the sheer size of the talent pool that'll emerge just a few years from now when today's young manga readers?a group roughly TEN TIMES the size of their predecessors?begin to put their dreams on paper?

I've been thinking about how the next generation of creators will be heavily influenced by today's manga. This sort of worries me in some ways. Reading even really good manga, I often find the copy to be very stilted, bearing the marks of its translation. I fear that a lot of people whose main experience with comics is through these somewhat artless translations may never pick up the ability to write really good english dialog.

But perhaps it's nothing to worry about. Good creators have grown up reading much worse things than poorly translated manga.

There's such an explosion of talent right now which can be traced to a small army of kids reading manga about 5-8 years ago. Has anyone considered the sheer size of the talent pool that'll emerge just a few years from now when today's young manga readers?a group roughly TEN TIMES the size of their predecessors?begin to put their dreams on paper?

I've been thinking about how the next generation of creators will be heavily influenced by today's manga. This sort of worries me in some ways. Reading even really good manga, I often find the copy to be very stilted, bearing the marks of its translation. I fear that a lot of people whose main experience with comics is through these somewhat artless translations may never pick up the ability to write really good english dialog.

But perhaps it's nothing to worry about. Good creators have grown up reading much worse things than poorly translated manga.

Way back when I was on the cutting edge of trends around 89/ 90* I was on the whole Japan/ manga vibe. And like a lot of the kids today, I aped the style without the skills to back it up, and with little understanding of what it was I was aping to begin with.

As I grew more knowledgeable in comics, and I stopped being such an insufferable manga nerd, I grew to appreciate the finer aspects of Japanese comics and realized that not every single manga looked like Ranma 1/2, or Slayers. And strangely enough, I was able to shed that aping thing and develop my own style.

While I can see Amy's influences in her work, she's obviously been able to step away from them and I think she's been rapidly developing into her own style. I don't know her personally, but I can only imagine that she's been able to do this because she's learned what manga and comics are really about and has stopped trying to make it look like "manga", if that makes sense to you.

By taking a quick glance around the web, you can see a lot of "manga" style webcomics that would make it look like your worries are well founded. But those comics will vanish much like the spandex glut before the bubble burst. I'm fairly certain that those artists who have managed to figure it out before that happens will be the ones the kids will all be talking about in fifteen years as their influences.

The same could apply to 'Western' style comics as well, not every comic has excellent script and despite similarities, manga and 'Western' comics are vastly different communicative tools. It could be that a script which is kept in line to the original would seem inferior since translations to English is difficult but I believe the responder is able to make informed decisions about the quality of a comic no matter the background or source it comes from.

A comic's script is its life, and the dialogue brings it through, in Insanity team, our writer produces the dialogue from block bits I write and we've found it to be a working system. Sometimes I find that something could be said easily within the confines of a speech bubble in Chinese or Japanese but it'll be lost if the same length is written in English.

I hope people, especially upcoming artists will realize that the differences in the languages means a requirement to change a direction to come from in the dialogue to make it beautiful for readers of any ethnicity. It isn't wrong to not stick to the scripts word for word as long as it expresses what the manga-ka is trying to express through the art. Just let it flow ne? ^_^_________________Enter a world unlike our own, yet hauntingly familiar. Virus manga.